Heart & Soul
October 1, 1995
God told Isaiah that one day he would speak to his people with foreign lips and strange tongues. None was stranger than the torrent of profanity through which he spoke to my friend Louis Evans, Jr., early one evening.
He was sitting in his study, staring blankly out the window at the row of trees that lined the foundation of the sanctuary. The church needed to change but wouldn't. He had tried to tweak its structures and renovate its forms to make new skins for the new wine of the Spirit. But one brilliant idea after another had been heaped on the junk pile of board vetoes and congregational indifference.
Suddenly Louis heard the church's groundskeeper fill the air with some of the most vituperative--and creative--profanity he had ever heard. Louis went outside to ask what was the matter.
Several weeks before, the groundskeeper had suffered a long illness and was forced to leave his job for a period. In the interim, the church hired an outside company to care for the grounds. The grounds- keeper had been painstakingly shaping the trees that lined the sanctuary's foundation into pyramids. But the temps had decided globes would be better.
Thus the cursing. They had ruined his work, and it would take a long time to get it back to where it was. As he explained to Louis, "It will take years, because you can shape the trees only as much as they have grown."
That's when God spoke to Louis: "You can shape the trees only as much as they have grown." He had been trying to shape the church before it had grown. He had seen the church as an engineer would a building project. He needed to see it as a grounds- keeper would a garden.
The engineering model had him trying to bring about spiritual change through programs and structures--in essence, ...
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